[ic] Manually returning a 404 = blank page

Wed May 18 11:48:10 EDT 2005

> >>> emailgrant at gmail.com 05/16/05 10:38 PM >>>
> > > My special_pages/missing.html page doesn't return a 404 when it is
> > > accessed.  When I use something like this:
> > >
> > > [tag op="header"]
> > > Status: 404 Not found
> > > Content-type: text/html
> > > [/tag]
> > >
> > > or this:
> > >
> > > [tag op=header]Status: 404 missing[/tag]
> > >
> > > on the page, I get this:
> > >
> > > <html><body></body></html>
> > >
> > > instead of the normal content.  Does anyone know why that's happening?
> > 
> > This worked for me in 5.3 (tested with Lynx):
> > http://www.icdevgroup.org/pipermail/interchange-users/2005-January/ 
> > 042084.html
> 
> I don't understand it.  If I have that tag in there my page only returns this:
> 
> <html><body></body></html>
> 
> and still won't return a 404.  Where does that HTML even come from? 
> It doesn't make any sense considering my catalog.
> 
> - Grant

The <html><body></body></html> is something IE and some other browsers do when the page they get is empty.  I imagine it's cause their parsers freak out when there's nothing to parse.

I hope you have something besides the [tag] stuff in your missing.html page.  If you don't, that's part of the problem--404s should still have content, and if you don't create it in missing.html, you'll end up with a blank 404 page.  IE might do its "friendly HTTP errors" thing, but anyone whose browser doesn't have its own built-in error pages will see nothing but blankness.  

For reference, i tried the single-line header, and it seems to work fine.  Returns a 404 status code and all.  And the rest of the content, which i left in the page, still shows up.

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